Had he changed, really? he asked himself—and not for the first time, although this situation, and in particular that letter, had made him ask it with more intensity and urgency.
Yes, he decided. He had changed—before the Well World. Decades as a smuggler, pirate, mercenary, you name it, had led him, toward the end of his life, to a feeling of bored malaise. He had decided that he had done everything he could do, conquered every world he was likely to conquer, bedded all the beautiful women he could want. He had done it all, and had a lot of fun doing it, but what was left? So he had taken his ship out, trying to get enough nerve to do himself in but unable to get over his strict Catholic beliefs he had turned his back on when still a young boy but which haunted him in his old age. Suicide, the one crime for which repentance was impossible… Continuing out, out into areas not yet explored or charted, he had found himself wishing that there was some new world, some new experience for him that would give new meaning to his life. Then there had been that odd distress signal, a look at a massive asteroid belt in a huge, sterile system circling a red giant, and, quite suddenly, here he had been on the Well World, the answer to his dream.
Or was it? he now wondered. As a young Ulik he had started again from scratch, learned a new society, new culture, experienced a whole new range of sensuality while accumulating power. But that had been long ago.
Now here he was, once again, at the same point he had been so long ago. There was simply nothing left to do. A velvet prison, Brazil had called it. But there were no Markovian holes to fall through this time, no new Well Worlds to start again.
He thought again of Brazil. If he was as ancient as he claimed to be, he was well over fourteen billion years old. Fourteen billion years. The mind couldn’t really grasp that. He doubted Brazil’s could, really. Never changing, living the same life after a while, life after life. No rebirth, no new experiences. Same form, same old stuff, even limited by the technology of the people with whom he had marooned himself. Entry interrogations—of this new batch, anyway—said that they had tracked him down by research, for even he left records of a sort.
Brazil had hardly been inconspicuous. He seemed to have been involved in every war and movement on Old Earth, always in the headlines, always in the forefront, yet clever enough that, even when his cover occasionally slipped, new legends were spawned. The Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew, Gilgamesh.
Brazil was trying to escape terminal boredom and madness, Ortega alone realized. But what the hell do you do when you’ve done it all and there’s nothing left to do? You pilot a freighter between Boredom and Tedium and try and forget who you are, what you are, putting on a kind of mental shutdown.
Brazil said this would be fun. Fun, of all things! And only to Ortega would that make perfect sense.
And that left him with a problem. Should he take on Brazil once again, see if, this time, he was still the master of the dirty trick and underhanded blow, always in control? The temptation was there—it certainly was. It would, as Brazil said, be fun.
But if he, Ortega, won, would there be a victory?
If he only knew the answer to that one…
Dillia
Asam and Mavra Chang looked out on their army. It wasn’t huge, by the standards of the history of the universe, but it was immense in terms of the Well World.
“Six weeks,” Asam muttered to himself, “all this in six weeks.”
She heard him, turned, and smiled. “If we had more time, we’d do even better,” she told him. “The Entries are still coming through.”
It was, in fact, mostly an Entry army, an army composed of creatures that flew, crawled, slithered, spun, and even oozed. Roughly a hundred and fifty to two hundred from something like eighty hexes—eight thousand alien creatures. To that were added over a thousand Dillians, the best chosen by Asam to avenge Dillian honor, and perhaps a thousand more native Well Worlders who decided, on their own or on orders from their governments, to join this side for the fight.
Such an army had several problems, of course, mostly in terms of communications and logistics. Though simply insuring that the commanders of each racial company had translators and using Com speech where possible eased the former quite a bit.
As for feeding the horde, they would take with them what they could and forage what they could not. They were not an army of conquest but one on the move; still, their sense of destiny made them disregard a lot of feelings about property rights where they were going. Almost half the force were herbivores, like the Dillians, and could get along most anywhere even if the fare was less than appetizing. For the rest, well, they’d taken on some provisions but they would never last—or keep—over the long march. Food worried Mavra most of all, since some of the species were perfectly edible to some of the others.
Another problem was that they were getting too many from the west; redundancies better picked up along the way or left to prepare the way. Many simply hadn’t followed instructions, some couldn’t. One couldn’t adequately brief a billion-plus people.
The premium went to weaponry, and some of it was formidable. Nontech hexes required the crossbow, sword, axe, and pike. The Dillians could hold their own there, with some of the others getting training as they went along. In addition to the Dillians some of the others could handle projectile guns. It took very little training to use a submachine gun effectively, only discipline.
It was the high-tech hexes they feared. Dillia could not supply that sort of armament, and precious little could be bought or stolen by a neophyte army reborn naked into this world. And not much could be arranged for in six weeks, either.
“I’m just amazed that so many of the hexes who voted against us are represented here,” Mavra noted. “I would have expected a lot more trouble.”
Asam shrugged. “Not that many hexes will actually lay their lives on the line, no matter how they side politically. There’s a pretty good backlash of feeling that things would be a lot nicer if we’d only go away, which is what we’re trying to do. That’ll intensify when a force this size crosses a border. It’s easy to rattle the saber if the enemy’s five thousand or more kilometers distant.”
She nodded hopefully, then said, “But some will fight.”
“Some will fight,” he agreed. “And the decisive battle they’ll try and force will be a nasty one. Don’t kid yourself on that. A lot of these people will die before this is done.”
That was a sobering thought, and for a while she was silent. Finally she said, “There’s word that a deep-water army is forming, too. Did you know that?”
“I expected as much,” he replied. “Gypsy said we weren’t the only ones—and each hex is getting an equal number of Entries. Remember, Brazil called a lot of his old buddies to him, and there was the crew of your little world. I expect that deepwater force will be necessary, too.” He took out an overall map and studied it.
“You think he’s really going by sea, then?” she asked. “Up the Josele-Wahaca Avenue?”
“Seems logical,” Asam replied. “I’ll bet something is, anyway. This computer of yours, the one that planned this, seems to have been quite a dirty trickster so far.”
She nodded. “And it’s a combination. Obie, Brazil, and Gypsy.” She paused. “Gypsy… I wish I knew more about him. Who he is. What he is. He scares me, even though he’s on our side. He’s like an Obie himself, all that huge computer capacity embodied in one being.”
“But your computer mostly did that sort of thing to other people,” Asam pointed out. “This Gypsy can only do it to himself.”